HARTFORD – UConn was bound to be bitten at some point by its worst habit. That point came Wednesday night. And the usual hero was unable to rescue the Huskies.

Unfazed by losing big leads and playing close games this year, the 10th-ranked Huskies blew another sizable lead against Stanford at the XL Center and wound up in another close game. This time, they came out on the wrong end of it.

The Cardinal overcame a 13-point, second-half deficit with a big run and then clamped down defensively, forcing UConn into mistakes and bad shots, to take a 53-51 victory before a crowd of 11,140. The loss dumped the Huskies (9-1) from the dwindling ranks of the unbeaten and spoiled their first game as a Top-10 team since January 2012.

Shabazz Napier has his own habit of making huge shot after huge shot. He tried, but was unable to repeat that feat for the umpteenth time. Napier missed a pair of 3-pointers and a 16-footer in the final minute. Omar Calhoun, whose shooting touch has deserted him, had a good look at a long 3-pointer at the buzzer but it came up short.

The Huskies, who head to Seattle today for Sunday's game against Washington, had won 54 straight non-conference home games. They had also won a trio of one-point games already this year. They failed in trying to make it a quartet.

Shooting 5 for 30 in the second half will result in that.

DeAndre Daniels led UConn with 15 points while Napier finished with 12. Chasson Randle led all scorers with 22 points for Stanford.

UConn extended a 10-point halftime lead to 43-30 with 16:48 to play on a reverse layup by Niels Giffey. It took Stanford all of 19 seconds to trim that lead to seven points. Anthony Brown and Chasson Randle canned 3-pointers during that span, making what looked like a comfortable advantage much more tenuous.

It got worse. Randle capped a 14-0 run with a three-point play that gave Stanford a 44-43 lead with 10:56 to go. At the time, UConn was suffering through a scoring drought of more than six minutes and had hit just one of its first 13 shots in the second half. The team that figured out a way this year to play against zone defenses suddenly looked like the one that couldn't do it last year.

Napier – who else? -- finally ended the scoring drought, which lasted 6:13, with a jump shot. The Huskies began to move the ball and score again but they couldn't shake the Cardinal. Eventually, the Cardinal shook them.

Stanford's size gave UConn some problems initially. The Cardinal worked the ball inside with regularity and added a 3-for-3 start from 3-point land. For the first time this year, the Huskies broke out intermittent possessions of zone defense to combat Stanford's inside game.

It worked as intended. The Cardinal never led by more than four points in the first half but they were clearly causing some issues. UConn made them a bit less pronounced by constant ball movement on the offensive end. The Huskies finished the first half with nine assists on 14 baskets. Seven of those assists came from Napier.

UConn was particularly effective in the final five minutes of the half on both ends of the floor. A DeAndre Daniels bucket began a 14-3 run to end the half that gave the Huskies a 38-28 lead. Stanford had a chance to cut the gap to four points in the final 55 seconds. Instead, it put itself into a bad position.

A missed 3-pointer wound up in Napier's hands. He lofted a long outlet pass to Ryan Boatright for an easy layup with 32 seconds to play in the half. Stanford called a timeout to set something up, but got nothing but a turnover on the baseline.

Again, Napier emerged with the ball and found Lasan Kromah ahead of the pack for another easy layup just before the halftime buzzer sounded.

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